Can someone explain why when I look at the detailed stats for my site late in the evening I have say 50+ Unique visitors then when I look again in the morning it only shows having had 20 visitors from the previous day?
Also I know the counter uses cookies and IP addys but my own stats show far more than your stats for unique visitors. Example would be your stats currently say I have had only 6 unique visitors today but mine show 20+ including hits from over 15 different countries. There is no way unless someone is using a laptop and diving from country to country that it can be the same person.
I used to get 70+ a day unique visitors now for some reason I'm struggling to get 20, has anything changed in the last 6 months in the way the counters work?
Cheers

Hi

Yes, we have recently changed the way we evaluate your amount of unique visitors. You can track a unique visitor either with cookies or IP address. Neither are 100% accurate, so a combination of the two is what works the best. Our live tracking is done with cookies and every night at 24:00 Central time the stats are corrected (IP/Cookie combo) to reflect the real unique visitor amount. Most people will see a decrease in unique visitors when this happens. Sites with many pageviews per visitor will see a significant decrease.

Why did we do this? Two reasons:

1. More people are disallowing cookies (Personal firewalls etc.)
2. We have had quite a lot of cheaters lately and our new stats are virtually cheat safe.


The following factors have to be taken into consideration when determining why there is a difference between your stats and the stats on our site:

1. If our code is on a page, unique visitors will get counted. Our stats servers are not busy.

2. Defintion of a unique visitor varries greatly between stat programs. Some reclaim a visitor as new unique if he has been away for 20min, 2hours etc. We first reclaim them after 24 hours.

3. Only pages with our code are taken into consideration. If using log stats all your pages are taken into consideration.

4. We don't consider spiders/search engines as unique visitors. We don't filter all spiders, but most of the ones we don't filter will not show as a visitor either since they don't bother loading the code/gif from our site. There are also a variety of programs out there set up to generate "false" traffic, which we don't consider real visitors.

5. We feel that our stats now are as close to reallity as you can get. More importantly everybody is counted the same way, so it is fair. The stats before were unfair since they favored sites with high repeat visitor rate.


You are more than welcome to send us your log files from a couple of days, so we can take a look to see if we can determine why you are showing a different picture.

No problem here is the link http://www.acseac.co.uk/bbclone/show_detailed.php like I said you can see that the counts include spiders but they aren't included in the unique visitors section. They are also from various countries, that's what is confusing me. Last night at 01:30 GMT I had 44 Unique visits, the previous 3 days had varying levels from 26 down to 17 when I looked this morning at 07:30 GMT the 44 had been replaced by 20 and the other stats had all been evened out to 20.

Hi

I really need your log files to be able to tell you what is really the problem, but allready from your posted stats I am getting an idea.

Just an example:

1847 21 May, 21:22:09 Storbritannien host213-120-115-68.in-addr.btopenworld.com 4 Windows XP Explorer 6.0

1828 21 May, 14:44:03 Storbritannien host213-120-115-68.in-addr.btopenworld.com 5 Windows XP Explorer 6.0

1825 21 May, 13:14:30 Storbritannien host213-120-115-68.in-addr.btopenworld.com 3 Windows XP Explorer 6.0

1819 21 May, 07:44:34 Storbritannien host213-120-115-68.in-addr.btopenworld.com 3 Windows XP Explorer 6.0

Are treated as 4 different unique visitors in your stats, but in reality they are the same guy.


and:

1812 21 May, 05:47:09 De Forenede Stater cache-rr02.proxy.aol.com 8 Windows XP AOL 9.0
1809 21 May, 05:45:55 De Forenede Stater cache-rr08.proxy.aol.com 4 Windows XP AOL 9.0
1810 21 May, 05:45:29 De Forenede Stater cache-rr04.proxy.aol.com 2 Windows XP AOL 9.0
1811 21 May, 05:30:58 De Forenede Stater cache-rh06.proxy.aol.com 1 Windows XP AOL 9.0

Are treated as 4 different visitors in your stats, but in reallity it is 1 unique visitor. AOL users use multiple IPs in the same session.

Just a few more comments.

Adjustments to stats are only done to the current days stats at midnight US Central time. So you will notice a drop when the stats roles to previous day. Stats beyond yesterdays stats are not touched.

In the first post you are comparing todays stats shown on your page with todays stats on our page. Realize that there is 6 hours difference between our stats and your stats, so when you posted at 9:23AM US Central time, 15:23 hours user stats was included on your site, but only 9:23 hours was included on our current day stats, so of course it is going to show less. Again our current day is not a good measure. After adjustment at midnight it is a lot better.

Just a couple of things to consider.